Greger - God

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Table of Contents

Also by Debora Greger

MOVABLE ISLANDS
AND
THE 1002ND NIGHT
OFF-SEASON AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD
DESERT FATHERS, URANIUM DAUGHTERS

for George and Zara Steiner

Acknowledgments

Antioch Review: The Porcupine, The Ruined Abbey

Gettysburg Review: British Rail, The Civil War, Subtropical Elegy

The Nation: There Now

The New England Review: God in Florida, Head, Perhaps of an Angel

The New Republic: The Dead of Summer, A Property of the National Trust

Paris Review: Moss in the Hamptons, To the Snow

Partisan Review: The Laurel Tree by the River

Ploughshares: The Snow Leopard

Poetry: The British Museum, Easter 1991, Eve at the Paradise, The Feast of Thomas Becket (as Les Trs Riches Heures de Paris), The Twilight of England

Salmagundi: Admiral of the Parking Lot, The Allotment Garden, The Eden of Florida, Persephone in the Underworld, To a Blackbird, Variante de la Tristesse: The Sadness of the Subtropics

Western Humanities Review: Miranda on the British Isles

Yale Review: The Overland Bus

Memoirs of a Saint was first published in Lines/Lignes: Rflexions/Reflections (UCLA, 1996)

on the cover: Wampum Snake and Red Lily, from The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahamas by Mark Catesby, 1771 (Department of Special Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida)

The poor maidservant who used to say that she only believed in God when she had a toothache puts all theologians to shame.

E. M. CIORAN

God in Florida

Q. Who created the heavens and the earth?
A. God.
Q. How long was God in creating all things?
A. Six days.
Q. What did God create on the first day?
A. Light.
Q. What was created on the second day?
A. The firmament.
Q. What the third?
A. Vegetables.

Childs Scripture Question Book, 1879

Book I: Pseudepigrapha

I Was Alone,

God said,
And out of loneliness
thought to make someone

who could tell me a story.
There was nothing but water in the dark.
That was the first day.

And so on.
Stars dragging themselves
out of the wet to dry,

but I needed better light.
I needed dirt.
There went a third day, and a fourth.

And in the vast emptiness
I tried stocking the bodies of water.
Like a face newly coined,

something glinted in the deep.
That was the fifth day,
but it wasnt enough.

And by the sixth day already
there was dust on everything.
I swept it up.

Out of my own dust I made someone.
I should have retired.
I should have gone fishing instead.

In the Beginning Was the Worm,

God said, And the worm was without a god.
The worm was a god.
Cities fell, a foot or more,

because of him. No one was buried
but he ate the first clod.
And men shone a light in the dark

and dug into the deep,
and the nightcrawler crawled out.
And I, their god, wriggled on the hook.

The God of Alligators

said, Lie down.
I can think only lying down.
Eternity is easier to take that way.

You dont have to make dry land
till mating season starts.
Then men will say

they saw you crossing the road
to the International House of Pancakes
south of town,

though youre interested only
in the female bellowing at you
from the deeps beyond.

Old Red-Eye, God said,
What would I know about finding a mate?
I just like to look

on all that I have made,
whether insects mating
or the British talking.

I, the retired god,
watch public television much of the evening,
and go south in the winter.

The Third Day,

give or take
a few million years,
the first blade of grass appeared.

And God said,
I have confounded Darwin
the man wants to know

how it happened so fast.
Redbird, look at his curious beak.
Pass him a seed, cardinal

no, the man wants flesh.
See how he fluffs his tailcoat,
preens and struts?

And on the fourth day,
in the hotel bar at Disney World,
God said, What would I know

about sexual selection?
Though I put on the hat of the Mouse,
the ears mean nothing to me.

And it was evening,
and it was morning,
the fifth day.

Dinosaurs tore at the darkness,
doomed as prophets. And God said,
I am like unto the leathery bird

with nowhere to go,
who flaps like a wallet
over the swamp primeval.

How could I be dying,
who love the smell of mildew
in the morning?

Book II: The Retired God in the New World

I dont like the man who doesnt sleep, says God...
Sleep is perhaps the most beautiful thing I have created.
And I myself rested on the seventh day.PGUY

The Seventh Day,

God said, I longed to take my rest
like any animal.
Sunday after lunch, the creatures fed

it was siesta time at the Paradise Zoo.
Along the thin arm of a branch,
the lemur cradled itself in sleep

as if, should it slip,
angels like apes would bear it up.
The seraphic snowy owl,

pinions pinned, wing yet to mend,
took and ate of the mouse.
Only the alligator was hard at work,

a god, flopped on a mudbank,
who winked the worlds slowest wink.
A lesser egret tiptoed by,

a Sunday hat on its way to church.
I yawned, God said. And when I woke
it was the eighth day.

A man was naming the animals.
A name hung on each cage.
Flinging themselves down

like angels, the gibbons spoke
only in their own tongue now.
I waited to be called by name.

I rolled over and played dead.

The Seventh Night,

God said, I cant sleep
with all the racket.
The cricket and the frog

why do they keep singing,
who have no mate in which to rejoice?
O bookworm boring your way

through my collected works, read on!
Did you recognize me?
Am I their god?

The cockroach would not enter my words
but devoted himself to the binding,
devouring the ancient starch.

On the old card catalogue,
shoved into the corner, no longer used,
the Nia sagged against the Santa Maria

like the whores of Castile
whose names they bore.
O Eves of easy virtue,

the cardboard seas are rough
with dust, the Pinta long since lost
to the night janitors mop.

Ladies, I cant sleep. Write down the words
they put in my mouth,
my ration of bread and water.

Dont forget to use quotation marks.
Do it the way the priests do.
In the beginning. At the end.

The Fourth Month,

God said,
The men made landfall at last,
and fell to their knees on the beach,

shouting, For God, for God and spices.

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